The Southern Poverty Business Model

Many of you out there have no doubt received in the mail desperate cries for help from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the do-gooder group that does very little good considering the vast sums of money it raises. But before you pull out your checkbook, make sure to read the following letter that Stephen Bright, an Atlanta-based civil rights and anti-death penalty attorney, recently wrote in declining an invitation to an event that honors Morris Dees, head of the SPLC.

Kenneth C. Randall, Dean and
Thomas L. McMillan, Professor of Law
School of Law
University of Alabama
249 Law Center
Box 870382
101 Paul W. Bryan Drive
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0382

Dear Dean Randall:

Thank you very much for the invitation to speak at the law school’s commencement in May. I am honored by the invitation, but regret that I am not able to accept it due to other commitments at that time.

I also received the law school’s invitation to the presentation of the “Morris Dees Justice Award,” which you also mentioned in your letter as one of the “great things” happening at the law school. I decline that invitation for another reason. Morris Dees is a con man and fraud, as I and others, such as U.S. Circuit Judge Cecil Poole, have observed and as has been documented by John Egerton, Harper’s, the Montgomery Advertiser in its “Charity of Riches” series, and others.

The positive contributions Dees has made to justice–most undertaken based upon calculations as to their publicity and fund raising potential–are far overshadowed by what Harper’s described as his “flagrantly misleading” solicitations for money. He has raised millions upon millions of dollars with various schemes, never mentioning that he does not need the money because he has $175 million and two “poverty palace” buildings in Montgomery. He has taken advantage of naive, well-meaning people–some of moderate or low incomes–who believe his pitches and give to his $175-million operation. He has spent most of what they have sent him to raise still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself. Because he spends so much on fund raising, his operation spends $30 million a year to accomplish less than what many other organizations accomplish on shoestring budgets.

The award does not recognize the work of others by associating them with Dees; it promotes Dees by associating him with the honorees. Both the law school and Skadden are diminished by being a part of another Dees scam.

Again, thank you for the invitation to participate in your commencement. I wish you and the law school the very best.

Karen Straughan, the Canadian activist and intellectual, takes an interesting look at the SPLC’s claim that two men’s rights groups are hate groups. She points out they are not, then discusses the genocidal proposals from any number of mainstream feminist groups and theorists that somehow escape the SPLC’s notice in “Hate!!!” at

I’ve been hashing it out with these SPLC people and they like to throw insults, name calling, personal attacks and so forth, but [never] present any facts. The only “law center” they are is a crooked one!

Jack Strawb

Oddly enough I just this evening dropped the SPLC an email on its dishonest claims wrt the men’s rights movement. The SPLC is note 7 on the men’s rights movement wikipedia page so I clicked through. Here’s what I found:

“THE CLAIM In another effort to show that men are discriminated against, many men’s rights activists assert that women attack men just as much as men attack women, if not more. The website MensActivism.org [a site so obscure it occurs to me that it's some sort of false front] is one of many that criticizes what it characterizes as “the myth that women are less violent than men.”

“THE REALITY Men’s rights groups often cite the work of Deborah Capaldi, a researcher with the Oregon Learning Center, to back their claim. Capaldi did find that women sometimes initiate partner violence, although women involved in mutually aggressive partner relationships were more likely to suffer severe injuries than the men. But Capaldi studied only a very particular subset of the population — at-risk youth — rather than women in general, invalidating any claim that her findings applied generally. In fact, the 2000 Department of Justice study found that violence against both women and men is predominantly male violence. Nine in 10 women (91.9%) who were physically assaulted since the age of 18 were attacked by a male, while about one in seven male assault victims (14.2%) were victimized by females. Similarly, all female rape victims in the study were attacked by a male, while about a third of male victims (35.8%) were raped by a female.”

“I find your page on the men’s rights movement so inexact it’s difficult to credit it as other than intentional deception on your part. It is peculiar to claim that MRA’s often refer to Deborah Capaldi’s work (which I had never even heard of) when they far more often refer to the work of Erin Pizzey, Murray Straus, Hanna Rosin, the American Psychological Association, Martin Fiebert and many, many other researchers who show beyond any reasonable doubt that women are indeed the primary instigators and perpetrators of domestic violence. If you have a genuine interest in correcting your claim to reflect the truth about about domestic violence by all means contact me. I will be happy to give you an authentic tour through the issue and through claims made by the mainstream of the men’s rights movement. Thanks, Jack Strawb.”

I’m not optimistic that I will receive any sort of reply in the spirit of intellectual inquiry, but we shall see.

Tex

Nice to meet you Jack and nice post by the way….I like it!

What got me into the mix, which was going for three days, was their comment about how Conservatives/Republicans/”Right Wingers” don’t care about women and how we hate them, etc, etc… Then they wanted me to explain why the Republicans voted against VAWA! So….being the Collegiate scholar I have been since the early 90s (being a Conservative scholar in a Liberal’s world of colleges is like being a sheep in a lion’s den), I went through the VAWA Act of 2013 yesterday and read it….all 107 pages of it and presented them with the facts! I could tell I made them nervous, because they kept deleting it (and several [other] factual comments), as fast as I could repost it, and I reposted it [several] times. What follows is what I presented to them:

Again…..You’re resorting to personal attacks and name calling, because you know someone else is correct and you don’t have a viable response. Actually, no I don’t copy and past, except links and titles, because I bother to do my own research, comprehend and summarize what I have read.

Actually..I [do] know [something] about the law. I had to take four semesters of Business Law for one of my degrees and was working on a degree in Criminal Justice back in the early 90s, which did include Constitutional Law. So maybe I’m not a law [professional], but I do know how to do my own research using laws and court cases, navigate around them and apply them!
Below are four of the [many] sites, with links, I used for research and I use [all] sites at my disposal, not just conservative or right wing sites:

4.) What’s Wrong with the Violence Against Women Act?http://nation.time.com/2013/02…
(Note: TIME magazine is a left leaning publication and Senior National Correspondent Michael Grunwald is as Liberal a person as there is.)

I could go on and on and on, but, evidently, y’all don’t bother to do the research yourselves! These are just a few of the sites that details how the VAWA compromises Constitutional rights.

Did you read the VAWA Act of 2013? I did today, all 107 pages of it! Upon reading into it, I found this act targets men! Now…Not talking about [actual] victims, but false “victims”; victims who claim rape (because of revenge motives), but [actually] were not raped. The bill allows for false “victims” to accuse a man of rape and allow that “victim’s” assertions to go unchallenged (via polygraph, or other), leaving said man as [actually] the victim.

This act also compromises Amendments I, II, IV, V, VI, X, XIV; presumption of innocence; right to due process; right to equal protection under the law; freedom from double jeopardy; rules of evidence; judicial, prosecutorial and law enforcement procedures; et. al….

You’re like a high school kid stuck in a social standing contest, who refuse to do your homework, because it’s too much reading, or it’s not cool, or it doesn’t jive with your opinion!

I can outclass you [any] day of the week!

(Oh yeah….your/the moderator deleted this when I posted it before, so I’ll post it again. I’ll keep posting it until your fingers get tired of clicking “Delete Comment”, or you ban me from the site….one of the two.)

“Look at how these right winger religious nuts treat women and you’ll understand their hatred of homosexuality. They treat women as a lower class of people. They look at them with thinly-veiled contempt. Homosexuality means that there might be men who look at *them* with that same contempt, because that’s the only way they can imagine sexual attraction to work. Lesbians, of course, are bad because there’s no man involved to put the women in their place.”

And I responded with:

“Umm…you’re full of crap. I’m rightwing and I treat my wife and my daughter like royalty! I respect all women and treat them as equals, if not better, to me! You left wingers are what is wrong with this country! I’ve been around the world over 100 times (Air Force aviator) and I have seen the best and worst in humankind. I have been all over the U.S., dealt with many high ranking people and must say I have seen Rightwingers treat women with more respect and dignity than Leftwingers. So why don’t you try and travel all over the world and experience things a few times, before you go jumping to conclusions in your sordid little mind.”

———————————–

After that exchange, they proceeded to call me names, paranoid, defensive, etc, etc…. They also proceeded to talk about my daughter, my 16 year old daughter, saying how it would be tragic if she got raped and got pregnant, etc. I told them to leave my daughter out of that discussion.

[Never once] did they present one fact, only names and personal attacks.

Jack Strawb

“Lesbians, of course, are bad because there’s no man involved to put the women in their place.”

In fact, lesbians are problematic for feminism in the sense that violence within lesbian partnerships is equal to or greater than violence within heterosexual partnerships. Little is more revealing of the problem of women’s violence, both in practice and in how it undermines feminism’s essential tenets, than how violence only increases when men are removed from the equation.

Of course, feminists have been suppressing the facts of women’s violence for decades, as Murray Straus and Erin Pizzey, to name only two, have shown.

As a small government progressive I couldn’t be more appalled at how feminism has kidnapped the left’s project of an expansive interpretation of rights.

Fwiw I’ve found Reason.com especially good in calling out the left and the likes of Ezra Klein for supporting viciously anti-civil liberties laws like California’s SB-967, the infamous “affirmative consent” law that pitches Constitutional protections into the gutter with both hands in response to a wholly nonexistent “epidemic” of college rape and sexual assault.

Tex

I agree Jack. Additionally, when one really and truly ponders on the problems plaguing our country, it can all be traced back to one source….Liberalism. There are some things that we as conservatives (or the like) are strict, or tight, on. Conversely, Liberals are loose on everything. Border protection, gay marriage, gays openly serving in the military, the budget, abortion and all those other hot topics….I could go on and on, but it would make no difference. Liberals want no, or little, structure; however, structure is needed for organization to succeed. Donald Trump did not [financially] just appear where he is at, he had a plan, he had structure and he stuck with ‘em. A house cannot stand without a structure.

Jack Strawb

Thanks, Tex. Good meeting you too. I’m exhausted tonight and don’t know when I’ll be able to reply, but I copied your post and saved the webpage as such in case of further deletions by the moderator.

Interesting, and speaking of your note on false accusers, I was just reading an article at AVoiceForMen.com by the marvelous Hannah Wallen titled “The Campus False Accuser Support Act.” Hannah doesn’t discuss VAWA directly but rather laws like it and the federal policies that led to it:

“He could be one of a million beach-bound, black-socked Florida retirees, not the man who, by some odd happenstance of life, possesses the brain of Albert Einstein — literally cut it out of the dead scientist's head.”